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Old laptop but running

Cienja

Cienja

Senior member
Hi. I recently did a fresh instal of Win7 on a Dell 1501 laptop. It was given to me years ago and I ordered a larger HD, more RAM 4GB, and gave it to my daughter. It worked just fine, but slowed and such over the years. I bought her a new laptop and took this Dell, ordered a new battery and power supply and when they arrived I installed and updated Win7 for several hours. Cool.

Now, it's slow doing everything. Closing programs, opening programs, etc. I haveFileZilla, Chrome, Firefox, Norton, Notpad++, and I think that's it. That's all that is installed.

I'm ruling out the HD and RAM because they are about 4 years old and I can't find any sign of them having issues.

Is this a motherboard or CPU issue or what? Please let me know what you think it is because I'm giving it away to a kid that doesn't have anything, and I don't want it to be dead in two weeks.

Thanks!
 
Because it is so old if you have techie friend or if you are familiar with hardware then I would advise to do 2 things. Get a can of air and blow the dust out of the laptop.
Blow into it in the air intake area first then blow air in the exhaust.

It could speed up after that if you never blew the dust out before.

Ok so the second thing if the blow dust out did not work would be the reapply thermal paste to the CPU.

Windows 7 will act a lot better if your version of Windows 7 was 64 then you could install 8 gig of ram. But lets do the cheap stuff first.
 
I also could see some overheating here. Turion 2 with Radeon graphics do get pretty warm. One test would be if the fans are spinning at high speed a lot of the time. If it hasn't been dusted out recently, great time to do so.

And you didn't mention it, but it is never a bad idea to do a virus scan on a slow computer.
 
Also, I know you said there are no signs of the hdd slowing things down, but you might want to look at the performance of your HD. If you go to task manager in windows 7 and click the performance tab then hit the resource monitor, you can click on the "disk" tab. If your disk is constantly running in the high 90's and 100 percentile range then I would recommend getting a ssd. Or closing the high read/write programs listed. Just a thought.
 
I have basically the same laptop for my daughter... a Dell 1501 with an AMD Turion two-core. I actually upgraded the CPU a few years ago, which makes it run pretty hot under sustained load, so it has to be used on a tabletop or other hard surface where it can get proper airflow. I bumped the RAM up to 4GB, added Windows 7 64-bit, and, most importantly... added an SSD. Even with the SSD it's not a lightning bolt, especially when multi-tasking, but it boots pretty quickly and runs a lot better than it ever did.

I would open Task Manager and msconfig and see what is starting at boot and what is running under normal circumstances. Running a good AV scan might help, too. The only other thing I can think to ask is how full is the HDD?

They are correct in their suggestions... blow out the cooler vents, or, if you are adventurous... take it apart and clean it properly, and re-paste the CPU.
 
You've all given me great feedback and rather than answer each of you, I'll do what you have suggested, which I've yet to do because most I've done or did a week ago, then I'll post the results.

I so appreciate your help!

Thanks!
 
Cienja said:
I haveFileZilla, Chrome, Firefox, Norton, Notpad++, and I think that's it. That's all that is installed.
Click to expand...

Just noticed that. Try turning off/uninstalling Norton and see how it does. I have just MSE and SAS running on my 1501, very light weight, but neither of us are going anywhere we can get into trouble, if you see what I mean. Make sure the end user understands the best AV is a judicious mouse click.
 
Charlie98 said:
Just noticed that. Try turning off/uninstalling Norton and see how it does. I have just MSE and SAS running on my 1501, very light weight, but neither of us are going anywhere we can get into trouble, if you see what I mean. Make sure the end user understands the best AV is a judicious mouse click.
Click to expand...

I've been so busy this week that I haven't tried any of the suggestions yet, so thank you for adding this!

You may be interested to know that it is a Norton product that we receive as part of our Internet package with Comcast. I do not know if they modify the Norton code in any way, but thought you might want to know that for the results.
 
Open up control panel, click on admin tools.
Now click on services.

What we are about to do is to disable all your eye candy.

So scroll down to THEMES Click on stop then disable.

You should get 5% to 25% more speed from your laptop.
If you see no improvement then re enable themes.
 
I agree with several posts above: a VERY likely cause of this is blocked cooling path leading to overheating so the system throttles itself. Just wanted to make you aware of part of the solution. Posters have advised using compressed air (clean, from a can) to blow dust out. SOMETIMES that does only part of the job. We had to clean out a laptop for my grandson and, when we disassembled it, found a wad of dust jammed into a corner of the air ducts and slowing the fan; it could not be blown out from outside. It had to be physically plucked out after opening the air ducts. So, if the air blowing does not solve your problem, you might consider having a service shop dig into it further. Unless, that is, you are comfortable and confident in doing that yourself.
 
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